GALACTIC PATROL by E E. Doc Smith

Author:E E. Doc Smith [Smith, E E. Doc]
Format: epub
Published: 2010-05-01T18:18:17+00:00

CHAPTER 13 - Maulers Afloat

A powerful fleet had been sent to rescue those of the Britannia’s crew who might have managed to stay out of the clutches of the pirates. The wildly enthusiastic celebration inside Prime Base was over. Outside the force-walls of the Reservation, however, it was just beginning. The specialists and the Velantians were in the thick of it. No one on Earth knew anything about Velantia, and those highly intelligent reptilian beings knew just as little of Tellus. Nevertheless, simply because they had aided the Patrolmen, the visitors were practically given the keys to the planet, and they were enjoying the experience tremendously.

“We want Kinnison-we want Kinnison!” the festive crowd, led by Universal Telenews men, had been yelling, and finally the Lensman came out. But after one pose before a lens and a few words into a microphone, he pleaded, “There’s my call, now- urgent!” and fled back inside Reservation. Then the milling tide of celebrants rolled back toward the city, taking with it every Patrolman who could get leave.

Engineers and designers were swarming through and over the pirate ship Kinnison had driven home, each armed with a sheaf of blue-prints already prepared from the long-cherished data-spool, each directing a corps of mechanics in dismantling some mechanism of the great space-rover. To this hive of bustling activity it was that Kinnison had been called. He stood there, answering as best he could the multitude of questions being fired at him from all sides, until he was rescued by no less a personage than Port Admiral Haynes.

“You gentlemen can get your information from the data sheets better than you can from Kinnison,” he remarked with a smile, “and I want to take his report without any more delay.”

Hand under arm, the old Lensman led the young one away, but once inside his private office he summoned neither secretary-nor recorder. Instead, he pushed the buttons which set up a complete-coverage shield and spoke.

“Now, son, open up. Out with it-everything that you have been holding back ever since you landed. I got your signal.”

“Well, yes, I have been holding back,” Kinnison admitted. “I haven’t got enough jets to be sticking my neck out in fast company, even if it were something to be discussed in public, which it isn’t. I’m glad you could give me this time so quick. I want to go over an idea with you, and with no one else. It may be as cockeyed as Trenco’s ether – you’re to be the sole judge of that-but you’ll know I mean well, no matter how goofy it is.”

‘That certainly is not an overstatement,” Haynes replied, dryly. “Go ahead.”

‘The great peculiarity of space combat is that we fly free, but fight inert,”

Kinnison began, apparently irrelevantly, but choosing his phraseology with care. To force an engagement one ship locks to the other first with tracers, then with tractors, and goes inert. Thus, relative speed determines the ability to force or to avoid engagement, but it is relative power that determines the outcome.

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